SACRAMENTO, Calif — State Epidemiologist Dr. Erica Pan addressed California's slow coronavirus vaccine rollout and provided updates on the distribution during a Community Vaccine Advisory Committee meeting on Wednesday.
According to Dr. Pan, 6.3 million vaccine doses have been delivered to the state as of Feb. 3, with 3.8 million doses administered and over 600,000 people fully vaccinated (having received both doses).
Dr. Pan spoke to the challenges that not just hospitals and care centers are facing when it comes to administering a still scarce supply of vaccines, but also the logistical problems that pharmacies are now dealing with.
"Like the overall vaccine rollout, it was a little bit of a bumpy start," Dr. Pan said. "Some of the challenges that we've been hearing, both from people on the ground and from the pharmacy leaders as well, is that the logistics have been huge."
CVS and Walgreens have partnered with California to schedule vaccination clinics at skilled nursing and assisted living facilities, which have been ongoing for a few weeks. As of Feb. 2, the CDC says 348,346 doses have been administered by those pharmacies in the state. Dr. Pan said all skilled nursing facilities should be done with vaccinations by the end of February, and all other facilities done by the end of March.
However, it has not been an easy process. Specific hurdles have arrived in the form of confusion when it came to knowing who to vaccinate first, difficulty with data reporting and communication issues.
"There were a lot of challenges with pharmacies being able to reach some of the facilities," Dr. Pan said. "You know, we heard that they were calling over and over again. It would take some times, several times actually, to reach some to schedule the clinic times."
Dr. Pan and other leaders spoke about what changes could be made to alleviate these issues, and addressed the ever present need to make vaccine administration an equitable and safe process. Marta Green, Chief of CalPERS Health Plan Research and Administration, broke down the plan for accelerating distribution. The state will to work directly with providers and has entered a partnership with Blue Shield of California to serve as third-party administrator for vaccines, an update that was spoken of previously in Gov. Gavin Newsom's state updates.
"First and foremost, as I've said to everybody that I've talked to, we're here to save lives," Green said. "So, that's what we're here to do today. We're here to save lives. And how are we going to do that? We're gonna do it through equitable distribution of vaccines."
Green said the state was targeting communities that have been disproportionally impacted by COVID-19 as part of their rollout plan. President and CEO of Blue Shield of California Paul Markovich added that this effort would include creating a performance management system that could track all vaccines from order to injection.
Markovich also talked about finding solutions to meeting the demand in underserved communities on the ground. He gave an example of why setting up vaccine clinics solely in target communities could pose problems when people drive in from a long ways away to receive a vaccine.
"So, we don't consider it a success to set up a network that has sites accessible in target communities," Markovich said. "Having a vaccine administered there is not success. Getting the communities that are the highest risk, that help us save the most lives, is success."
Markovich admitted that Blue Shield of California would need help with finding those solutions from the state. He said that the vaccine network that they are working on will start to be introduced in California within next month and will be phased in over multiple weeks.
